Do you feel like a fraud?

We are God’s offspring who were intended for greatness and we seem to ruin everything we touch.

From the the perfect Monday morning blog post for my soul! 

The Story of God, the World and You

Only true grown-ups can parent

A funny, searching and helpful exploration here of why it is we might be good at critiquing our parents but go all wobbly when it comes to doing the job better ourselves!!
No doubt there are multiple applications of this. But the main one seems enough to be going on with to be honest! 
Timothy Larsen says this very interesting thing in the article:

More and more I have come to value those who model how to no longer hold to the exact version of faith they grew up with while still finding ways to be grateful for and affirming of the community of faith that raised them.

HT Justin Taylor

Delightful

HT Tim V-B via FB

Children of LGBT Parents

The statistical studies:

The Kids Aren’t All Right: New Family Structures and the “No Differences” Claim

A personal testimony:

Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View

HT Matthew Mason via Facebook

Leaning to the left?

Why pushing to the right is harder than pushing to the left.

Andrew Wilson gives three reasons why this is the case in the UK today: 

1. The first is to do with the youth-centred spirit of the age, in which freshness is more fashionable than faithfulness, innovating inspires people more than imitating, technology trumps tradition, and novelty is confused with creativity.  

2. ... contemporary secular culture is well to the left of the Bible on most things it teaches. Non-Christian Britain thinks the Scriptures are backward on all sorts of topics, including judgment, evolution, tradition, war, marriage, slavery, sexual ethics, holiness, gender roles, and the idea of teaching doctrine in the first place. So when we move to the left, we are almost without exception moving closer to what the culture around us thinks, and that makes the process much more comfortable for us.  

3. ...the victims of excessive rightishness are much easier to identify, and to feel sorry for, than the victims of excessive leftishness. An anti-war protest is much easier to recruit for than a pro-war protest. It’s easy to make movies, or posters, about the victims of slavery and domestic abuse; not so much about the victims of abortion, since they don’t live long enough to be given names. When a couple splits up through unfaithfulness, causing massive pain to their children, the individualistic, morally leftish values that made it possible are not personified, and nobody blames the newspapers, TV shows or movies that make short-term romantic fulfilment life’s ultimate purpose. 

HT Justin Taylor

Our National Hypocrisy

How can you cheer for our Paralympians and support Britain’s abortion laws*?

* The 1967 Abortion Act as a pdf or this summary is from the NHS Website: 

In the UK, abortion is legal up until 24 weeks of pregnancy, although most abortions are carried out much earlier than this.In rare circumstances, an abortion can sometimes be carried out after 24 weeks (see below).The Abortion Act 1967In accordance with The Abortion Act 1967, an abortion must usually be carried out before 24 weeks of pregnancy.The few situations when the law states an abortion may be carried out after 24 weeks are:

• if it is necessary to save the woman's life

• to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman 

• if there is substantial risk that if the child were born, s/he would have physical or mental abnormalities and be seriously handicapped

HT: Maurice McCracken via Facebook 

The Empire Strikes Back

If you sing imprecatory psalms at those who took your parking place, you are either a fool or diabolical. If you "agree to disagree" with Jezebel, Nero, or the devil, then you are trying to adulterate the Word of God.

For the full exhortation to psalm singing blessing of your enemies click here.

Against Christianity (Notes 3)

Part 1 - Against Christianity 
Peter Leithart's first section has 23 points to it rather than chapter divisions. This summary will work through it in in chunks [Notes 1]. 

11. The Philippians, so proud of being Roman citizens and so protective of Roman custom, needed to learn to live as citizens of a different commonwealth that placed new demands on its citizens. [cf. Philippians 3:20] 
In short: throughout Philippians, which some identify as one of the least political of Paul's letters, Paul was treating the Church as an alternative to the politico-religious organization of the city and of the empire. 
12. politeuo shouldn't be rendered 'conduct yourself' but rather ' live as a citizen'. 
13. ekklesia echoes the Sinai assembly and the returned exiles; and in Greek it is the assembly of citizens of the polis for decision making and deliberation. So the Church is not presented as another 'sect' or cult that existed under the umbrella of the polis. She was an alternative governing body for the city and the beginning of a new city. 
14. Despite pagan opponents seeing this clearly even in the patristic era 'Christianity' was making an appearance (Church as philosphical club or escape into desert etc.). 
15. If salvation is the re-creation of man through Christ and the Spirit (which it is), then salvation must be restored relationships and communities as much as individuals. If Christ has not restored human community, if society is not 'saved' as much as the individual, then Christ has not restored man as he really is. Salvation must take a social form, and the Church is that social form of salvation, the community that already (though imperfectly) has become the human race as God created it to be, the human race that is becoming what God intends it to be. 

(Against Christianity p16-27)

Against Christianity (Notes 2)

Part 1 - Against Christianity 
Peter Leithart's first section has 23 points to it rather than chapter divisions. This summary will work through it in in chunks [Notes 1]. 

4. Christianity is biblical religion disembowelled and emasculated by (voluntary) intellectualisation and/or privatization. 
5.  The Church is strange: she is the creation of the Father through Word and Spirit, the community of those who have been united by the SPirit with the Son, and therefore brought into the eternal community of the trinity. She is a city whose town square is in heaven. She is a city without walls or boundary lines, a polity without sword or shield. 
But she is ordinary: the Church is made up of human beings, with features that identify her as a culture among the cultures of the world. 
God created a world of stories, symbols, rituals, and community rules. Into this world of stories, GOd came with His own library; in a world of symbols and rituals and sacrificial meals, the Church was organised by a ritual bath and a feast of bread and wine; in the midst of cultures with their own ethos and moral atmosphere, God gathered a community to produce the aroma of Christ in their life together. 
6. The Church can cut across the grain of existing human societies and cultural life only if she bears some likeness to existing societies. 
If the Church is God's society among human societies, a heavenly city invading the earthly city, then a territorial conflict is inevitable. 
7. Paul, Peter and John visit Georgus Barnus, a religious marketing consultant in the mid-first century. A very very illuminating sketch! 
8. Anti-supercessionism [the view that contemporary Jews are still in covenant with God] seems more a result of post-Holocaust guilt than of exegisis. 
9. Every church is an urban reality; every Christian lives in the suburbs. What is meant by this is that Churches on earth are outposts of heavenly Jerusalem that will be revealed at the last day (Galatians 4:26; Hebrews 12:1-27; Revelation 21). 
10. Aristotle's Politics begins with the claim that 'every state is an association (koinonia)'. The political koinonia (the city being it's highest form) is aimed at establishing things that are 'common' (koinos) to the citizens. 
The apostles tell us that the Church also forms a koinonia arising from the common sharing in Christ and His Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:12-13). 
In short, the Church is not an addition to the Greco-Roman polis but an alternative to, the koinonia of the polis. 

(Against Christianity p16-27)

Thoughts to Young Men (3)

General Counsels to Young Men 
1. Get a clear view of the evil of sin 
2. Become acquainted with our Lord Jesus Christ 
3. Never forget that nothing is as important as your soul
4. Remember it is possible to be young and still serve God 
5. Determine always to make the Bible your guide
6. Never make a close friend of anyone not a friend of God 

Thoughts for Young Men - JC Ryle Chapter 3

Prove it

I want to suggest that scientific proof, philosophical proof and religious proof follow the same rules.

After the question has been defined, in each case proof consists of two steps: 

A. The theory must be non-contradictory and must give an answer to the phenomenon in question.  

B. We must be able to live consistently with our theory.  In other words, the answer must conform to what we observe in a wide consideration of man and how he behaves.  

 (The God Who Is There, p110-111)

Thoughts for Young Men (2)

Special Dangers Facing Young Men 

1. The sin of pride
2. The love of pleasure 
3. Thoughtlessness and lack of consideration 
4. Scornful contempt of religion 
5. The fear of other people's opinions

Thoughts for Young Men - JC Ryle Chapter 2

Against Christianity (Notes 1)

Part 1 - Against Christianity 
Peter Leithart's first section has 23 points to it rather than chapter divisions. This summary will work through it in in chunks.

1. The Bible never mentions Christianity but speaks of Christians and the Church. Christianity is gnostic. 
2. Christianity is the heresy of heresies and underlying cause of the weakness, lethargy, sickness and failure of the modern church. 
3. In itself the linguistic fact of point 1 has little significance. The Bible never uses the word trinity either. The issue is the concept, and 'Christianity' is often used to refer to a set of doctrines or a system of ideas [and is contrasted to the teachings of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam]. But the Bible never speaks of such beliefs except as all-embracing confessions of God's people. No 'belief system' can be isolated from the church and put in the lab for analysis. And the church is not a people committed to common ideas, but is a people committed to a whole stance of life. The Bible in short is not an ideological tract and does not teach an ideology. 
Sometimes 'Christianity' is used to embrace not only beliefs, but the practices of Christian people and the Church. This is better - but not if this is conceived as being a 'religious' layer added onto human life. Being a Christian is not simply a matter of installing a new 'religious' program into an existing operating system - it is the installation of a new operating system. And this goes for church too, for church is not another layer on social life, but is rather, a new way of living before God and of being human together. 
What Jesus and the apostles proclaimed was a new human world, a new social and political reality. In other words, a salvation. God has established the eschatological order of human life in the midst of history, not perfectly but truly. The Church anticipates the form of the human race as it will be when it comes to maturity. Conversion thus means turning from one way of life, one culture, to another and our 'resocialisation' into an alternative paideia. 
In the NT, we don't find a two story house. 1st story: private faith. 2nd story: public implications. The gospel is the announcement of the Father's formation, through His Son and the Spirit, of a new city - the City of God. 

(Against Christianity p13-16)